Picture this: Criminology,image and narrative

Reading pictures

A classic example of an art historian working with key sociological ideas is Michael Baxandall (1974), whose Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy examines the conditions under which painters worked and how the patronage system in place at the time influenced the content of a picture, and reconstructs how Renaissance viewers understood and interpreted painting in a period of social change. His book opens with the following assertion:

A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship. On the one side there was a painter who made the picture, or at least supervised its making. On the other side there was somebody else who asked him to make it, provided funds for him to make it and, after he had made it, reckoned on using it in some way or other. Both parties worked within institutions and conventions – commercial, religious, perceptual, in the widest sense social – that were different from us and influenced the forms of what they together made. (Baxandall, 1974: 1)

His attempt to recover the social experience and historical logic of the ‘Quattrocento eye’ has been influential, and has revealed just how different the ‘picture trade’ was then. Not least since the idea of the individual artistic genius was yet to take hold and painters were craft trained as ‘professional visualisers’ of biblical and hagiographical stories, where the goal was to capture the attention of the viewer in such a way that it would encourage close contemplation and engagement with what was depicted (Baxandale, 1974: 45–56). Yet to communicate complex events and ideas through visual imagery is extremely difficult and it is one of the achievements of early Renaissance art to have overcome the challenges presented by a silent medium and succeed in mobilizing ‘a viable “visual language”’ (Lubbock, 2006: 275). By the 15th century most pictures are religious pictures, but this term does not just refer to the range of subject matter, rather it describes their institutional role in meeting certain intellectual and spiritual ends under the patronage and control of the Church and the network of European royal courts. Up until the 19th century European art is dominated by the ‘sacral institutions’ (Bürger, 1984) and is closely tied to Renaissance traditions, where artists and their field of production had yet to secure creative autonomy from the external demands of Church and State (Bourdieu, 1996).

Images were a vital means of ‘indoctrination’, in the original meaning of the word, as they taught Christian doctrine, and the writings of Pope Gregory the Great (c.540–604) on the matter were quoted frequently over the centuries and inspired a sophisticated body of ecclesiastical theory on their theological value. His insistence that ‘Pictures are placed in churches so that those who cannot read in books might “read” by viewing the walls’ (in parietibus videndo legant quae legere in codicibus non valent) (cited in Burke, 2001: 48) became the definitive statement on the use of images in the Church. The implication is that the spectator should be actively engaged in reading the picture and learn from the story narrated in it, aiding both worship and conversion to Christianity. In this understanding, an image is not simply a reminder of the spoken word nor a devotional illustration, but is a text in its own right, recording the experience of those who witnessed biblical events, and could be just as much a statement of doctrine as the written word. The heightened awareness of the power of signification in the grand traditions ‘of medieval scholasticism and Renaissance neo-Platonism’ and the systematic methods of textual interpretation they developed have been described as ‘structurally decisive for all ideas of the meaning of images over the longue durée of the Christian and humanist West’ (Didi-Huberman, 2005: xv). Art historians themselves work on the assumption that visual representation is composed of legible signs and can be deciphered through rational scholarly methods. I now turn to such an approach in art history that anticipates semiotics, parallels the kinds of discourse analysis now prevalent in cultural studies and has shaped more sociological approaches to art.

The terms ‘iconography’ and ‘iconology’ came to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, and were associated with the art historian Aby Warburg and his followers, who included Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind and Fritz Saxl, each of whom went on to become celebrated figures in the humanities. They were each concerned with the meaning of works of art, and their approach was a reaction against the predominantly formal analysis of how a painting looks, in terms of composition or colour, at the expense of the subject matter. The ‘iconographers’, as it is convenient to describe them, sought to distances themselves from the kind of art connoisseurship that relies on the idea of possessing a ‘good eye’ (Rogoff, 1998: 17), which is a way of looking at paintings that is neither methodologically or theoretically explicit, but assesses them according to their compositional ‘quality’ (Rose, 2012: 52). Instead, as one influential definition put it, ‘iconography is that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form’ (Panofsky, 1957: 26). In other words, the approach emphasised the intellectual content of a work of art, how the symbols and signs in it would have been understood at the time it was produced.

Although set up as an opposition between ‘form and meaning’ it is evident that in Panofsky’s method this distinction is blurred, becoming less of an antagonism, but more complex and multilayered. The overall aim was to render the processes by which meaning is constructed as far less impressionistic and naturalistic than commonly understood, and he offered an ideal set of procedures used whenever meaningfulness is attributed to objects. This method was summarised in Panofsky’s (2009 [1939]) in essay distinguishing between three levels of interpretation corresponding to three levels of meaning in the work itself. The first is ‘pre-iconographical’ and is concerned with ‘natural subject matter’, which consists of identifying objects and ‘pure forms’ (such as animals, plants, buildings, people) and grasping their ‘mutual relations as events’ (battles, meals, processions and so on). The second level is iconography in the conventional sense, where the specific depictions arranged in an image have a particular symbolic resonance, enabling the viewer to tell the difference between a depiction of a dinner party and the ‘Last Supper’. The third and ‘deepest’ level is the ‘iconological’, which concentrates on ‘intrinsic meaning’ and identifies ‘those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion’ (Panofsky, 2009 [1939]: 222). It is dedicated to unravelling the general cultural significance of an image and requires a thorough grounding in historical contexts to be fully understood.

This final level is largely an unconscious process, and it is unlikely that the artist ever intended to condense so many cultural attitudes in a work of art. But Panofsky insists they are there nevertheless, and his book presents many examples from the Renaissance to make this point. He also applied the method in his Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), which was later translated by Pierre Bourdieu (1967) and published with a postface where he discusses the significance of Panofsky’s study for the sociology of art, especially in the concept of ‘habitus’ for describing the relationship between predispositions acquired through educational institutions and the aesthetic rules of composition deployed in medieval architecture. In a further essay, Bourdieu (2003 [1968]) draws on Panofsky’s tripartite levels of signification to demonstrate how art connoisseurship marks out status distinctions and lends itself to a charismatic ideology of taste, which functions as an important form of cultural capital. He explains that since ‘their art competence is the product of an imperceptible familiarization … members of the privileged classes are naturally inclined to regard as a gift of nature a cultural heritage which is transmitted by a process of unconscious training’ (Bourdieu, 2003 [1968]: 174). The ‘love of art’ distinguishes the cultivated from the barbaric, so that institutions like museums and those other ‘civic temples’ where ‘bourgeois society deposits its most sacred possessions’ reinforces ‘the sole right of the middle class to appropriate art treasures to itself’ (2003 [1968]: 176–177). Clearly, Bourdieu is emphasizing that the appreciation of art is not an innocent or universal pastime, and his work demonstrates how art institutions are themselves complicit in sustaining social inequalities.

Panofsky’s approach was an abiding influence on Bourdieu, and it can be seen as an important precursor to the development of semiotics, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as psychoanalytical understandings of the gaze in cultural theory. Moreover, there is an emphasis on intertextuality (often by juxtaposing other texts and other images with the image under consideration), which anticipates subsequent forms of postmodern deconstruction and discourse analysis. Examples of the latter approach include Mary Cowling’s (1989) study of how the East End of London was visually constructed in the Victorian imagination, while Georges Didi-Huberman (2003) has traced the crucial role photography played in the invention of hysteria and Sander Gilman’s (1985) collection of essays details the stereotypes surrounding race, sexuality and madness as they evolved from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. In my own research on the iconography of punishment (Carrabine, 2011a, 2013a) I have examined some of the dominant ways in which penal landscapes have been represented since the 18th century. Images and texts are embedded in the social worlds that produced them, and while they should not be read as unproblematic sources of historical information they do provide ‘invaluable cultural barometers’ (Gatrell, 2006: 11) and tell us much about the tensions animating an era. Cultural processes should always be seen as part of a whole, so that the practice of textual or visual analysis must always be linked to a material analysis of the institutions and social structures surrounding the work.

Although Panofsky was himself fairly hostile to the social history of art, this was less so for Aby Warburg, who pioneered a distinctive approach to art history and founded the institute that bears his name. ² Warburg published little (especially in English), but his ambitious research programme was devoted to illustrating how the memory of a past impacts on culture. In particular, he was concerned with understanding the fate of the classical tradition in European art, and identifying the devastating impact Western cultural practices were having on non-European forms of expression around the world. A key concept he coined was the Pathosformel – the ‘pathos formula’ – to describe the ‘experience of passionate suffering’ originating far back in pagan antiquity (cited in Eisenman, 2007: 53). In doing so, he furnished art history with ‘access to a fundamental anthropological dimension – that of the symptom’ (Didi-Huberman, 2004: 15, emphasis in original). ³ Images, and the stories they contain, tell us something meaningful about the individuals or groups who produced them.

The concept has been influential in art history, and is regarded as a core idea explaining deep seated structures of cultural memory (Johnson, 2012). Significantly, it has also been used to analyze the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs that first came to global attention in the spring of 2004 (Eisenman, 2007). On Warburg’s inspired reading, the prisoners at Abu Ghraib ‘were shown in the subservient position of defeated warriors from Hellenistic Greek sculptures; naked detainees from the global “war on terror” were posed (as in a tableau vivant) like the bound slaves of Michelangelo; anguished bodies evoked martyred saints in Baroque churches’ (Eisenman, 2007: 11). The compelling claim then is that the Abu Ghraib images are not some depraved departure from the codes of the Western cultural tradition, but are rather firmly rooted within them.

The overall argument is that the resemblance between the Abu Ghraib photographs and the ancient pathos formula is not accidental. It reveals a fundamental mythic structure (in the semiotic sense) that ‘represents the body as something willingly alienated by the victim (even to the point of death) for the sake of the pleasure and aggrandizement of the oppressor’ (Eisenman, 2007: 16). Warburg certainly did not mean that the pathos formula was permanently fixed and forever unchanging, but is instead an enduring structure of thought and form occasionally deployed with nuance and innovation, so long as certain essential features of composition remain present. As Nigel Spivey (2001: 119) explains, ‘artists of a much later age could use a Classical pathos formula without necessary regard to its original intention’, not least since ‘a pagan frenzy of delight could serve as a pattern for a Christian frenzy of grief: for the expressive impact, the frenzy is what counts’. Warburg was especially concerned with dynamic images of extraordinary mourning, whereas Eisenman (2007: 54) highlights what he calls the ‘eroticization of suffering’ in the ancient pathos formula. This is a provocative claim and elsewhere I have spent some time discussing it (Carrabine, 2011b), but here I want to concentrate on medieval penal imaginaries and the storytelling to be found in them, to indicate what might be termed the ‘narrativity’ of images (see also Sandberg (2016) where his argument on ‘tropes’ and ‘fragments’ has clear parallels with the argument in this paper). At this time the visualization of abstract ideas becomes especially significant and the source of considerable debate, not least since the question of representation was central to each of the world religions a European might encounter: Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Although Islam and Judaism were both peripheral in the overwhelmingly Christian Europe, visual culture featured in the decorative and built environment, but the depiction of sacred figures was forbidden. In the Christian church concerns over paganism and idolatory were frequently expressed, but by the later Middle Ages painting and sculpture are not only tolerated but are actively encouraged to enhance religious buildings, ceremonies and rituals (Kessler, 2007; Woods, 2012). The term ‘medieval’ covers a variable time span according to different geographical locations, but is generally regarded as covering the period from the ninth to 15th centuries. Although the main aim of this paper is the development of a visual narrative approach, it also speaks to the growing body of ‘punishment and society’ scholarship in criminology. However, this is from a rather different vantage point than is usually the case (for a recent collection of essays giving a sense of the range of approaches now flourishing in the field, see Simon and Sparks, 2013), but the essential point is that images can help us understand penal practices of the past. ⁴

Medieval penal imaginaries

The view that justice in the Middle Ages was equated with extreme cruelty is a longstanding one, where the insistence is that gruesome torture and spectacular executions were an integral part of everyday medieval life (see Puppi, 1991, for a graphic catalogue of such images). Such characterizations are examples of what Umberto Eco has dubbed ‘shaggy medievalism’ (cited in Mills, 2005: 8), where the epoch is understood to be so dominated by violence, plague, famine and death that it is no surprise that the culture displays ‘a profound fascination with flowing blood, torn flesh and fragmented body parts’. However, this emphasis on medieval alterity, in which the monstrous otherness of the times is accentuated, has been challenged by some recent writers who have instead sought to provide a more nuanced interpretation of premodern experience. For example, it has been noted how portrayals of the ‘suffering Christ, twisted and pathetic’ replace ‘the traditional serene and dignified image of Christ the King on crucifixes’ signifying a ‘particular preoccupation with pain’ in images of the crucifixion and various scenes of the Passion in the late Middle Ages (Burke, 2001: 48). These graphically realistic depictions sought ‘to convey the historicity and actuality of the event’ (Merback, 1999: 16), so that ‘the man on the cross begins to be seen as a real man, beaten, bloodied, disfigured by pain’ and becomes a celebration of the ‘humanity of Christ through his sufferings’ (Eco, 2007: 49).

The idea that a prison sentence, both as a form of penitence and a test of faith, could bring one closer to God is one that emerged during the early persecutions of Christians under Roman rule. Likewise, the Jewish Bible is full of prison imagery where ‘vivid expressions of human helplessness and terror’ mix with the ‘language of confinement and release, of captives ransomed by God, of refuge and sanctuary, and of exile and return’ (Peters, 1998: 13). From such sources there developed an early imaginary of the prison emphasising martyrdom, in which physical suffering is transformed into divine grace. The most famous example is Boethius’s On the Consolations of Philosophy, written in the early sixth century while a prisoner of the Ostrogoths in Italy, which describes his mental tribulations during captivity, torture and eventual execution. Among the lessons he imparts while contemplating his fate is that even the most terrible ordeals offer opportunities to enrich the mind and soul.

Figure 1 is a French illustration of Boethius in prison produced in the 1460s and gives an indication of the complex ways images conveyed messages. The seated Boethius is listening to the teachings of Philosophy, represented as a woman, while outside another woman symbolizes Fortune turning a wheel on which are four figures – the one above is a King enthroned, a second at the bottom is falling down and the third and fourth at the sides are ascending and descending. The wheel was a widely used allegory highlighting the downfall of the mighty and the fleeting temporality of life on earth. The image does not pay close attention to verisimilitude like much medieval painting, but does narrate a story encompassing religious, ethical and legal issues in ways that evoke ‘the sound of the voice’ (Camille, 1985: 28). The view that pictures were the Bible of the poor and illiterate has been challenged on the basis that many were too complicated for ordinary people to understand. However, in the predominantly oral culture of early medieval Europe the iconography in the images and the doctrines they illustrated would be explained by the clergy, so that they acted as a ‘reminder and reinforcement of the spoken message, rather than an independent source’ (Burke, 2001: 48).

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Figure 1.

Boethius in prison. Frontispiece to Book II of Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, French, c.1460–1470.

Boethius’s text was a major influence on Medieval and Renaissance Christianity and helped instill the virtues of religious piety through contemplation and penance. In this way the prison came to be understood as a cloister and it is no accident that the carceral metaphors of early monastic spirituality were so intertwined and helped promote the ascetic life. The close association between imprisonment and purgation was further reinforced in the 13th century where doctrinal changes established Purgatory as a distinct place in the netherworld landscape and revitalized interest in the hereafter, where God is cast for the first time as a ‘potentially benevolent jailer’ (Geltner, 2008: 86).

However, it was the image of the dungeon that was the most widespread when priests spoke of hell, the place of eternal damnation for the wicked. It has been shown how the penal realities of the 12th and 13th centuries gave shape to popular understandings of the punishments that awaited sinners in the underworld (Baschet, 1993). Dante’s Inferno, composed around 1310, is the most well-known piece of apocalyptic literature produced in these times. He provides a ‘vision of hell as a deep pit, dark and smelly, its inmates suffering extremes of either heat or cold, with every additional form of torture inflicted upon them’ to suggest that the worst that could happen in this world was just a foretaste of what was to come in the next (Dunbabin, 2002: 169). The likening of prison to hell gains considerable traction from the 14th century onwards. In Padua and Verona, prison wards become called ‘the Inferno’, the Flint Tower at the Tower of London was nicknamed ‘Lytle Hell’ and by 1310 ‘Helle’ is the name of the king’s debtors prison at Westminster (Geltner, 2008: 92).

During the Middle Ages the iconography of the Last Judgement was the fundamental source for representing the concepts of law and justice, and artists evidently relished portraying the various torments inflicted on the sinful in their work. The following passage conveys the close ties between art and punishment at this time:

Hell itself was often represented as a system of dark caverns or cut-away niches looking not unlike the dank jail cells of the old podestà’s palace in Certaldo, which survives to this day. In each of hell’s caverns, demons perform specialized horrors upon the damned who are usually without clothes, wearing only a headpiece of some sort which alludes to their earthly sin. Trecento artists took pains to show these sinners as naked and not nude – the distinction being that the former is a condition of embarrassment while the latter, as perfected by artists in the following centuries, became a condition of pictorial beauty. Artists of the Middle Ages, especially those living in such urban communities as Florence and Siena, would frequently have seen living wrongdoers stripped naked in public, as a form of punishment prescribed by the local law courts. Some acts of obscene humiliation often accompanied these sentences in real life, which Giotto and Fra Angelico also reflected. In Giotto’s fresco, two sinners in hell are shown hanging upside down, a man by a rope attached to his penis and a woman by a hook in her vagina. (Edgerton, 1985: 27, emphasis in original)

Others too have argued that the majority of artists were drawing on their direct knowledge of execution and torture techniques provided by the legal processes and penal codes of their own cities to observe at close hand the flogging, hanging and beheading furnishing the public spectacle of punishment (Puppi, 1991: 79). Rather than discuss Fra Angelico’s celebrated painting of the Last Judgement, which also depicts Jesus as judge, where the saved souls ascend into heaven on his right, and to the left the damned tumble down to hell experiencing a full repertoire of the devil’s punishment, I will focus instead on Figure 2, which is a small painting by him showing the decapitation of five blindfolded saints.

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Figure 2.

Fra Angelico, The Beheading of Saints Cosmas and Damian, predella panel from the altarpiece for the high altar of San Marco, Florence, c.1440–1442, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

What is immediately striking about the picture, to a modern viewer, is the ‘unnerving sense of suburban normality’ it conjures up (Spivey, 2001: 94). According to another art historian the image prompted in him a four-decade long interest in pictorial narrative, describing how the:

sense of rhythm of the executioner swinging his sword as he moved around the circle of kneeling martyrs, three already beheaded, two awaiting their fate; the simplicity of the background with its five cypress trees and the five towers of the walled city; the pure and brilliant colours and clear morning light all helped to stimulate the vivid impression that the event was actually taking place before my eyes. (Lubbock, 2006: xi)

Although it was painted some 20 years before Figure 1, it is an early example of perspectival realism, ⁵ where the scene is rendered so naturalistically that the canvas appears to become a window on to reality; it is as if the spectator is looking through the frame out into the real world behind it. The importance of this innovation is that it shifted ‘painting away from “mirroring” Nature as if it were a mere reflection of God’s true brilliance in heaven, to seeing Nature as if through an open window, not as a divine mystery revealed by geometry, but as world perfection framed by geometry’ (Edgerton, 2009: 8). The birth of linear perspective in early 15th century Florence not only had a profound effect on the history of art, but was also crucial to the history of science and technology in the Renaissance – ultimately undermining the very medieval Christian cosmology that inspired it in the first place.

Questions remain over the extent to which the extreme violence represented in medieval depictions of suffering resembled lived experience and punitive practices. To take imprisonment as an example, it is likely that the association of prisons with an earthly Hell was a late-medieval innovation, and one quickly gaining widespread currency in the art and literature of the time, similarly in the medieval Muslim world ‘representations of hell offered a powerful discourse that helped the underprivileged to come to grips with the reality of punishment and suffering in this world’ (Lange, 2008: 15, emphasis in original). In both cases the relationship between state punishment and divine retribution suggest that the perceived centrality of spectacular forms of punishment in medieval culture operated at the level of ‘discourse and fantasy’, where what is recorded in these chronicles is not so much evidence of how the law worked in practice, but how it should work ideologically (Mills, 2005: 16). Such an interpretation helps explain the paradox of why recent studies of crime and punishment reveal that judicial violence was exercised much more selectively and leniently across many regions of late medieval Europe than is commonly understood (Dean, 2001), yet the images and texts of the times give the overriding impression of a culture punctuated with bloodcurdling penal spectacles. Here the depiction of pain and suffering offers a ‘powerful emblem of intersubjective experience’ (Merback, 1999: 20), so that the images of extreme violence do not exactly reflect the realities of medieval life, rather they helped to dramatize them. As Javier Moscoso (2012: 12) puts it, they ‘do not show us history, but emotions’ constituting and organizing sensibilities. And this is the fundamental point; these symbolic texts tell us a great deal about the cultural values and concerns of different times and places.

Art, discourse and narrative

Art does not so much imitate life, rather “art imitates art” as Malraux put it (cited in Bourdieu, 1993: 140) and in order to develop an analysis of the iconography of punishment it is vital to pursue this insight further. Here Bourdieu’s sociology of art is especially important as he emphatically rejects ‘internal’ readings of artworks, which insist that the meaning and value of art transcend the historical conditions of their initial creation and reception. Yet he also dismisses conventional modes of sociological analysis, defined as ‘external’ readings, that often reduces the origins of an artwork to the social milieu in which the artist operates (such as the rise of a mercantile class and art patronage in Renaissance Florence). Rather every artist and their work takes up a position in the field, and the range of possible positions will depend on the history of the field, the development of generic styles, professional contacts and so on. In the Rules of Art (1996) Bourdieu distinguishes between ‘priests’, those ‘consecrated’ artists with established reputations in the field, and the avant-garde ‘prophets’ whose stylistic innovations place them in opposition to generic conventions. Yet no matter how bitter the conflicts between them are, they ultimately share an unshakeable ‘interest in the game’, a deep ‘investment’ in the stakes of the field, and it is this objective consensus that lies beneath the surface of all these struggles – and it is this that helps shape the ongoing reproduction of the artistic field (Bourdieu, 1996: 227). Ultimately the origins of artistic worth do not reside in the artworks themselves, but in the social institutions where they are produced and consumed. In his study of the emergence of an autonomous field of artistic production in 19th century France Bourdieu focuses on three pivotal figures: the painter Edouard Manet, the poet Charles Baudelaire and the novelist Gustave Flaubert. Each helped shape modern understandings of art and each’s work possesses a ‘universal’ value in that they heroically rejected the dominant traditions of both ‘bourgeois art’ and ‘social art’.

What is rather surprising is that ‘for someone whose sociology of art seemed to pose such a radical challenge to existing hierarchies of aesthetic value, Bourdieu seems to ultimately to have left those hierarchies firmly in place’ (Lane, 2005: 42). As Jeremy Lane goes on to point out, Bourdieu’s understanding of universal aesthetic value unwittingly reproduces the very same exclusionary tendencies he had revealed in his critique of conventional aesthetic theory. It is as if Bourdieu’s systematic scepticism is not reflexively extended to his own concepts and methods, leaving a whole series of questions unanswered, and while he sets himself the task of thoroughly debunking the ideological illusions that predominate in art worlds he still wants to insist on the sacred character and magical qualities of art.

If Bourdieu is at times extremely critical of art history, there are occasions where he is clearly influenced by its interpretative procedures. This is far less the case with Foucault (1994 [1966]) who bypassed them altogether in his discourse analysis of Las Meninas. In his reading of the painting it is seen to signify an epistemic break in the mid-17th century and is used to explore the relationships between art and the structures of knowledge in particular eras. Not unsurprisingly his approach has not found favour among orthodox philosophers and the historical community of scholars on the Renaissance; as one critic complained, Foucault draws on ‘a narrow sample of thinkers, a significant number of whom are also cited in histories of occult or deviant philosophy in the same period’ (McLean, 1998: 151, in Lechte, 2012: 48). Yet it did play a significant role in highlighting the limitations of conventional art historical methods, which relied on a combination of ‘flamboyant and idiosyncratic voice …; anecdote; biography; connoisseurship; the reverence for the artist as genius; the art-historical practice of identifying influences and formal and stylistic analysis’ (Greslé, 2006: 218). In many respects it was foundational to the ‘new art history’ emerging in the 1970s and 1980s that became far more aware of the structures of social power and the fallacies of internal readings of visual texts. Here the influence of feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism opened up issues of culture and agency, which suggested the need for stronger interdisciplinary perspectives in the history and sociology of art. This move is one I broadly welcome, but this should not involve ‘naïve borrowings’ of terms and methods (Lyall et al., 2011: 11), rather a more robust sense of what it is different disciplines bring to debate.

One influential exponent of the ‘new art history’ is Grisdelda Pollock (2003 [1988]: 15), who has discussed how fruitful discourse analysis has been to open up questions of the way art history itself is involved in ‘a series of representational practices which actively produce definitions of sexual difference and contribute to the present configuration of sexual politics and power relations’. Such a move, combined with a Bourdieusian understanding of the social production of art, can enable rich insights into how ‘all discourse is occasioned’ (Gill, 1996: 142). The word icon is from the Greek for ‘image’ and was born in a specific, religious context, reminding us that it is culturally produced and involves a process that is not at all natural, mobilizing certain rhetorical strategies that can speak to the political complexities of the age. This form of argument has recently been developed in an analysis of the ‘iconography of famine’ in the 20th century ‘asking how and why stereotypical portraits of famine victims continue to be produced’ and their function (Campbell, 2012: 80). ⁶ Likewise Pollock has recently addressed the controversies surrounding Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer prize winning photograph taken in 1993 of a vulture gazing on an exhausted, starving child in the Sudan. ⁷ Here she takes issue with ‘the pathos formulae of our times’ where ‘suffering has become the banal condition of human life’ in a world that is capable of realizing so much more than ‘bare and often fragile or brutally short life, and why it is our preference to see it’ (Pollock, 2012: 71–72). It has been argued that the visualization of physical suffering in our contemporary media culture has some close ties with the proliferation of images of extreme pain in early modern Europe, in that forms of visual representation ‘turn emotions into narratives’ (Moscoso, 2012: 18). This is not to suggest there is a long line of continuity from past to present, but rather the ties themselves are closer and stranger than we might think.

A key dynamic is the relationship between narrative and experience, which the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1984) has distinguished into three basic positions on the relationship, summarised in the following way:

First, narrative may be seen as an objective representation of experience – a historical record of what happened. Second, narrative may be seen as a subjective interpretation of experience. As in the first conceptualization, narrative as interpretative statement reveals what happened but through a subjective lens. Third, narrative may be seen as shaping experience. In this conceptualization, experience is always understood and acted upon as it has been storied. Narrative criminology adopts this third view, which may be called constitutive. (Presser and Sandberg, 2015: 4a)

The position outlined in this paper too shares this constitutive view: we not only tell stories, but stories also tell us. This was a point that was fundamental to the interpretative anthropology of Clifford Geertz (1973), who often likened his methodology to that of penetrating a literary text and famously distinguished between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ descriptions of culture. It has also been advocated as a way to look ‘afresh at our own visual culture and interpret these as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves’ (Howells and Negreiros, 2012: 142). But in order to do so we need a well-stocked ‘intellectual armoury’ (Geertz, 1973: 4) to grasp how art narrates human experience, and the arguments developed in this paper are a way of grappling with the question of what it is they are saying, while recognizing that meaning is both cultural and historical, and can change over time.

Conclusion

Narrative criminology is still taking shape in the discipline, and it may well be among the last of the social sciences to recognize the storied character of social life. The narrative moment has also been seized in cultural criminology (Aspden and Hayward, 2015) and this paper has attempted to develop a sociologically grounded visual analysis of two artworks that address criminological issues. It is, of course, only one avenue for visual narrative inquiry to pursue, and I have spent some time addressing the history and sociology of art, mindful that there is ‘nothing worse than lower common denominator interdisciplinarity’ (Urry, 2005: 1). The goal has been to indicate what it is that different disciplines bring to the debate, rather than reducing them to an indistinguishable blur. One of the consequences of the striking expansion of criminology, as an academic discipline, over the last 25 years or so has been the diversification and fragmentation of it to such an extent that the field is ‘at risk of sinking into a set of cliques where criminologists read the work of others who think like them, write for those very same people and publish only in the journals that they and their colleagues are already reading’ (Bosworth and Hoyle, 2011: 3).

Evidently there are dangers, but it is also worth reminding ourselves of the opportunities such fragmentation provides, helping to enliven and transform mainstream concerns, while potentially becoming home to new and radical voices from the margins. But to me the broad frame of narrative enquiry sits within C Wright Mills’s (1959) insistence that the sociological imagination occupies the intersection of biography, history and social structure. What is clear though is that much sociology, ‘core’ and otherwise, has proceeded as ‘though history and biography are optional extras’ (Stanley, 2005: 5.5). It is perhaps no accident that Mills has also been rediscovered by criminologists (Frauley, 2015; Young, 2011) as they try to produce creative, boundary challenging work and in this the narrative turn can revitalize the sociological soul of criminology.